The Case of Bigg Market, Newcastle Upon Tyne
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Heritage as a Vehicle for Development: The case of Bigg Market, Newcastle upon Tyne Loes Veldpaus and John Pendlebury School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK doi:10.1080/02697459.2019.1637168 Abstract: In this paper we examine the way conservation-planning has changed since the global economic crisis in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK), where austerity is still an all- consuming issue. Focusing upon a recent project around the Bigg Market, a historic public space, we map the new ‘conservation-planning assemblage’ where ‘other-than- public' forms of management have taken hold. We identify impacts of austerity, deregulation and a smaller state ideology, and show how the agency of heritage assets and narratives in urban context is focussed on economic performance and competitiveness. Within the conservation-planning assemblage, roles and responsibilities have changed, and we reflect on the impact this has on conservation policy and practice. Keywords: urban governance; heritage; conservation-planning; austerity, Business Improvement District; Newcastle upon Tyne Bigg Market Banter Mentioning to someone in Newcastle that Bigg Market is the case study we are working on is typically met with a smile followed by raised eyebrows, a wink, or a ‘must be interesting field work…’. The Bigg Market in Newcastle upon Tyne (England, UK) connotes the city’s urban nightlife, as a place with undercurrents of violence, associated with a drinking culture, and a classed and gendered sense of place (Nicholls, 2017, p. 125). As the market area of medieval Newcastle, there is a long history to this, but the explicit connotation has been strengthened in recent history. As Hollands (2016) states in his chapter revisiting 20 years of urban night life research “As a sociologist, living in Newcastle in the early ’90s, I was intrigued by the constant stream of negative press coverage of nightlife in the city, particularly the area called the Bigg Market.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s this area slowly became the heart of Newcastle ‘party city’, which was turned into a rebranding strategy for a city in need of post-industrial uplift (Madanipour, 2009; Wharton, Fenwick, & Fawcett, 2010; Hollands, 2015). By 2006 its role in the night-time economy had become well established (Newcastle City Council, 2006).This rebranding led to a boost in the area’s economy, but was also central to creating its reputation as a place for excess drinking, further 1 mythologised by series such as Geordie Shore and Bigg Market Banter (‘Bigg Market Banter’, 2010; ‘Geordie Shore’, 2011). However, the Bigg Market area is also considered to be a significant place in Newcastle’s urban history, and its built environment is seen as a testimony to that. Together with the “New Castle” and St Nicholas Cathedral, it is a visible remnant of Newcastle’s medieval history. It is part of Newcastle’s Central Conservation Area and valued for its medieval morphological patterns of the markets, burgage plots, chares (small lanes), yards and related permeability, as well as the intricacy of the rich and eclectic architecture (North East Civic Trust, 1996; Pendlebury, 1999; Conzen, 2004, pp. 108–115; Newcastle City Council, 2010b; North of England Civic Trust, 2016). In addition, about half of the buildings along the Bigg Market, Cloth Market, and Groat Market are covered by local listings or Grade II and II* national listings. At present these qualities do not define the area. Rather, the medieval structure, talked about as a ‘hidden gem’, is under pressure, vulnerable to degeneration as much as it is to potential regeneration. This paper focuses upon how conservation planning and heritage have been discursively represented and operationalised in the process of ‘revamping’ the Bigg Market. We look at how heritage narratives are selected, how heritage funding is used and how the conservation-planning assemblage (Pendlebury, 2013; Pendlebury et al., 2019) changes. Looking at this within the wider context of the decade since the 2008 financial crisis, the first part of the paper focuses on issues of integrated conservation and urban planning partnerships in the context of austerity and deregulation. We then examine and discuss the workings of the changes to conservation-planning in English policy and practice in the context of Newcastle, and in particular the Bigg Market case. We consider this case illustrative for the post-crisis context as it piloted a new governance arrangement for conservation- planning. Newcastle’s Local Planning Authority did not have resources or in-house capacity to apply for funding to pursue the improvement of Bigg Market and NE1 Ltd., the Business Improvement District (BID) Company for the NE1 (city centre) postcode stepped into this vacuum. The role of the BID Company in this process is specific and novel, but with over 300 BIDs in the UK (Turner, 2017, chap. 3) and about 80 per cent covering city centre locations, they have become common players in the urban governance of historic urban cores, and their interest and importance in conservation- planning is growing (Trends Business Research, Pomegranate Seeds, & Middlesex University, 2016). We followed the process of the ongoing public realm scheme for the Bigg Market by means of a critical analysis of a series of expert interviews (2016-2018) with key actors in the formal process of the Bigg Market project, through contextualising documentary data, supported by field notes drawn from observations in various project meetings and onsite visits. Using these critical readings, the paper aims to conceptualise the changes to conservation-planning practice and how the role of heritage is changing in the conservation-planning assemblage, how shifting roles and responsibilities are mediated and negotiated, and how they affect conservation-planning practices. 2 Heritage Management and Urban Governance To manage urban heritage more comprehensively, various national and international organisations have argued for the further and better integration of heritage management and urban planning (e.g. English Heritage, 2008; UNESCO, 2011). Conservation-planning is seen as one of the tools to facilitate this integration. Historically conservation-planning was seen as a way to preserve the urban character and fabric of the past for future generations, through protecting certain tangible and aesthetic dimensions of the historic environment. Heritage was to be protected as a repository of historical and cultural value, rather than to perform any wider social or economic role (Pendlebury & Strange, 2011). The call for integration proposes a reframing of conservation as the ‘management of change’, as a practice that is guiding as well as “adding value” to and through (urban) transformation (Veldpaus, 2015, pp. 19–23). Moreover, heritage is now more commonly understood as a way of enacting or mobilising the past in the present. This discourse on heritage defines and positions conservation as a practice that is, on the one hand, using a dematerialised ‘value-centred’ conceptualisation of heritage, in which value can be retained while material dimensions disappear (see for example Park Hill case as discussed in Pendlebury, 2013) and, on the other hand, a practice in which heritage is supposed to create social, cultural, ecological, and economic gain (Hall, 1999; Kisić, 2017, Tolia-Kelly et al., 2017). Thus, the practice of conservation-planning as well as the role of heritage within it is changing. This reconceptualization recognises the empirical reality that heritage has acquired new roles over the past half century. Heritage has for long been used to affirm or reject national identity, class structures, and hegemonic cultures. More recently it has been used as a post-modern liberal critique of traditionalism and conservatism, and a means of performing diversity and inclusivity. At the same time it has been pushed as a latent economic commodity to be exploited (Pendlebury & Veldpaus, 2018). Those additional uses of the heritage will likely further limit, simplify, and steer how, and how much, cultural values are mobilised. We argue that the felt need to exploit heritage in an urban context, is partly rooted in the ongoing integration of urban planning and heritage management. In the conservation-planning assemblage, as Pendlebury (2013) discusses, the heritage concept is (re)framed to work for wider planning objectives. Heritage in this assemblage needs to enact not just its (hegemonic) cultural worth, but also perform other roles. In the context of England he shows it needs to demonstrate its compatibility with existing modes of property-based economic development. To retain legitimacy in a planning context with a strong growth agenda, heritage cannot be seen to block or even be neutral towards economic development; it has to facilitate and stimulate it. Consequently, institutional bodies such as Historic England and UNESCO frame heritage as an active and positive agent of change in the process of urban development, to emphasise the fact that in addition to its economic prospects, heritage can enhance quality of life, provide a sustainable mode of development, sustain a local connectedness, and foster local character and traditional approaches in a globalising world. Thus it has become normalised that heritage is used as a vehicle for change, with an assumption that it makes a positive contribution to urban and socio-economic development. Framing heritage in this 3 way, however, affects the